Ex Machina

Budget - $15 million

Box office/gross – £36 million

Filming – 15^th July – September 2013

Director: Alex Garland

Writer:            Alex Garland (28 Days Later)

Actors:            Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander

Producer: Scott Rudin (executive)

Ex Machina was released in the United Kingdom on 21 January 2015 through Universal Pictures. The film screened on 14 March 2015 at the South by Southwest festival prior to a theatrical release in the United States on 10 April 2015 by A24 Films.

Ex Machina tells the story of a programmer who is invited by his employer to administer the Turing test to an android with artificial intelligence. Nathan has built a humanoid robot named Ava with artificial intelligence. To program her behaviour, he harvested personal information from billions of Bluebook users, using their search queries as indicators of human thought, and hacked billions of cell phones for recordings of human expressions and body language. He wants Caleb to administer the Turing test to Ava, a test designed to measure an AI's ability to persuade the tester it is human. Caleb points out that this is not a fair test, as he already knows Ava is an AI; Nathan responds that Caleb must judge whether he can relate to Ava despite knowing she is artificial.

6 weeks to film, but post production took 6 months, no green screen.

Meanings:

Deus Ex Machina – “God from the machine"

1. (in ancient Greek and Roman drama) a god introduced into a play to resolve the entanglements of the plot.

2. Any artificial or improbable device resolving the difficulties of a plot.

Postmodernity:

Artificial Intelligence -  ‘The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.’ – Jean Baudrillard. Ava’s suit/whole concept of film.

Uses Baudrillard’s idea of hyper reality, simulacra, illusion of what is real.

Very small cast, all set in one place/location that is very modern, colour scheme, chromes/monochrome and red.

Intertextuality, similarities between Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and ‘Apocalypse now’ colonel walter e. Kurtz. Both isolated themselves geographically and psychologically, both see themselves as a kind of ‘God’. Blade Runner, testing consciousness, self aware AI, contrasts aware of Ava’s AI and Unawareness of Rachael’s AI.  

Protagonist is questioned, argued it could be Caleb but it shifts throughout.

Asks questions beyond the basic questions about AI, such as: Where does gender reside? Is gender something that’s in consciousness or is it a physical thing? Or is it something that’s conferred on you by other people?